Poem 435

Thinking about how dictators fall and the fact that most of them started off fighting for some kind of freedom … drawn from Michael Moorcock’s Breakfast in the Ruins and also from Doctor Zhivago I imagine this man as having survived an atrocity as a child, the formative event of his life which both freed him and set him on his path with burning ambition and an unassailable sense of moral right … now he finds he’s no different to the people he took up arms against and overthrew … what was visited on him he visited on others but any special dispensation that trauma gave him has long since worn off …

( … I like the rhyme of cocked/click/clock, the smell of sea amongst the smell of death, and the difference in scale time and technology between an up-close-and-personal carriage of dead bodies and an industrial engine of death … )

The Dictator’s Last Day

His city is burning
each cocked click of the clock
an explosion
a new window
another building

his people expect a message
they are waiting outside the doors
while he thinks of the boy
pushing through the tarpaulin
the tangled bodies
and how the distant morning
and the approaching sea
combined to smell of release

he said
                now I will roll off
                trusting to anything
                believing in nothing

and if he was free then
tumbling blameless from death's carriage
like a sheep or pig
like a new birth
when did the blessing dry
on the victim?

how did he come
to drive this engine?